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yumeka-sxf · 2 months

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Japanese Linguistic Observations in Spy x Family - part 5

Part 5 - Translating humor and wordplay

Translating jokes from one language to another can be difficult, especially when the humor revolves around wordplay that's only apparent in the original language. Luckily for a comedy series like SxF, most of the humor relies on concepts that are universal to all languages, but there are the occasional jokes that require creative translation in order to get the same effect in English. What I think is the most well-known example of this kind of joke in SxF is from chapter 26, where Yuri tells Anya that "knowledge is power" during their tutoring session.

The Japanese phrase for this is 知は力 ("chi wa chikara"). Anya mishears this as ちわわぢから ("chiwawa jikara"), which means "chihuahua power," which is why we see the image of a muscular chihuahua in her thoughts. This results in Yuri calling her チワワ娘 ("chihuahua girl") from then on. Obviously this joke would be lost if translated directly, so Casey Loe, the official English translator for the SxF manga, got creative with making it work in English. He cleverly utilizes the English expression, "the whole enchilada," which sounds enough like "swole chihuahua" for Anya to believably mistake the two. This translation also makes it so that Yuri calling Anya "chihuahua girl" later on makes sense.

But unfortunately, because a series can have different companies working on the localization of its anime versus its manga, inconsistencies between the two often come up. In this case, the anime team translated this joke completely differently, and less effectively in my opinion. You can see from the below screenshots that they had Yuri use the word "unleash," which then led to Anya associating a (muscular) dog without a leash as powerful (?) Again, this translation was a stretch in my opinion and not as good as the manga version. This also makes it so that translating Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl" won't make sense.

But what's interesting is that, many months and episodes later in season 2, they stayed consistent with that translation and had Yuri call Anya "stupid leash girl" in episode 28.

Despite my dislike for this translation, I have to give them kudos for remembering it all that time later and not just directly translating it as "chihuahua girl." Though it makes me wonder if they'll stay consistent in season 3 where Yuri will be referring to Anya as "chihuahua girl" once again.

A further complication is that, not only do these kinds of inconsistencies exist between the anime and manga translations, but they also exist between the different streaming services that stream SxF with English subtitles throughout the world. I only have access to the subtitled version from Hulu, which is where my screenshots are from, and I think other streaming services in the US like Crunchyroll, Amazon, Netflix, etc, use the exact same subtitles. So when I refer to "the Hulu subtitles" throughout this post, I mean other major US streaming services too. However, I'm not totally sure if they all do share the same subtitle script, so if anyone who has these services could confirm, that would be great! However, @tare-anime informed me that Muse Asia's English subtitles for SxF are completely different! For example, they translated the above joke more closely to the original, by using the phrase "puppy power" and keeping Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl."

There are further differences with Muse Asia's translation as well, for example, they directly translate Anya's names for Loid and Yor, "chichi" and "haha," as "Father" and "Mother" instead of "Papa" and "Mama."

(thanks again to Tare for the Muse Asia screenshots!) This is different, not only compared to the Hulu subtitles, but also the official English manga as well, both of which have Anya consistently use "Papa" and "Mama."

Tare also let me know that Disney Plus in Asia, another service that streams SxF, has yet another version of the English subtitles! And these are only the subtitled versions for the US and Asia - if SxF is streamed with English subtitles in other countries, I wonder if those are different as well. That means there's at least 3-4 different English subtitle scripts for SxF, with different ways of translating certain things, like what I described above. This could make things confusing for someone without any knowledge of Japanese who reads the English version of the manga and watches the subtitled version of the anime on one or more streaming services...if they read the first few volumes of the manga with the "swole chihuahua" translation, then watch season 2 of the anime, they're gonna be confused about why Yuri calls Anya "stupid leash girl." There's other more minor inconsistencies too, like how the Hulu subtitles have Yor call Anya "Miss Anya" all the time, but the manga doesn't.

I'm sure there's some licensing reasons why there isn't one official English subtitle script that all the streaming services can use, and why they don't consult the manga translations, especially for the more difficult-to-translate parts. It seems like wasted effort for so many official English translations to exist for the same thing.

But anyway, back to the translations of jokes in SxF, another one that stood out to me occurred in chapter 23. During the scene where Loid is asking Anya about a name for Bond, he explains how dogs have trouble discerning the sounds of consonants. The phrase he uses for this is 子音の聞き分け("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "distinguishing consonants," with "shiin" meaning "consonant." However, there's another word "shiin" with the kanji 死因 that means "cause of death." This is what Yor thinks he means - 死因の聞き分け ("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "determining the cause of death." So in her thoughts, she imagines asking Bond if he prefers death by blood loss (失血死) or by being crushed (圧死), and when he shakes his head at both, she says "you're not good at these distinctions, are you?"

This is a difficult joke to translate, so Casey got a bit loose by having Loid use the word "plosives" instead of "consonants," and then having Yor mishear it as "explosives." He then changed up Yor's dialogue by having her say that Bond prefers C-4 explosions over other methods of death.

While I don't think the translation of this joke worked as well as the previous one (I feel like Yor wouldn't know about C-4 explosions?) I couldn't come up with anything better myself, lol. It just goes to show how translating things as closely to the original as possible isn't always the best choice…but oddly, that's what the Hulu subtitles did! For some reason they opted not to even attempt to rework this joke for English, and kept both Loid and Yor's dialogue as exact translations. This results in an exchange that makes no sense and will leave people wondering how Yor could mistake Loid's "can't tell consonants apart" as "can't tell causes of death apart."

However, there are some cases where the wordplay works similar enough in both Japanese and English that the joke can be translated without too much modification. An example of this is in chapter 59 where Becky asks Yor how she was able to "get" Loid…"pierce his heart" as she puts it. Yor thinks she means this literally, to which she replies that she wouldn't hurt Loid.

The Japanese version is very similar, with Becky using the verb 射止める("itomeru") which means "to shoot down" (with an arrow). However, it has a figurative meaning too, which is "to win" as in "win someone's heart." Yor thinks Becky means the literal meaning of shooting down, so she says that she wouldn't shoot Loid and that she doesn't even use a bow and arrows.

The Hulu subtitles translate it more or less directly, having Becky say "shoot an arrow through his heart" and keeping Yor's "I don't use a bow and arrows" that the manga omitted. Rare case where I think the anime translation worked better than the manga!

In the case of this joke, the concept of "shooting someone's heart" to mean "winning someone's heart" is universal in both English and Japanese, so little reworking was needed. This also helped keep consistency with Yor's tendency to associate otherwise benign concepts with violence due to the nature of her work.

I'll wrap up this post with what I think is the most commendable translation of a joke so far in the manga: how Casey translated the names of the guest characters at the ski resort in chapter 94.

Their names are puns in Japanese as well, and Annie over on Twitter already did a great breakdown of how each of the wordplay in their names was translated, so definitely check out that thread here. Since this chapter has yet to be animated, I'm really curious how the anime translators will handle this…since it seems like they don't reference the manga, they'll probably either translate the names literally or come up with their own pun names, and either will unfortunately lead to the same kind of inconsistencies between the anime and manga translations that I touched on earlier.

To summarize, humor can be a very culture/language specific thing, so it's up to the translator to make sure the same feeling is conveyed in their translation even if they have to essentially make up their own jokes. With that said, it's a shame that there isn't collaboration between the translators of the anime and manga to ensure consistent translations across the franchise. So I hope this post helped shed light, not just on how some of the jokes in SxF were conveyed in Japanese, but also on why some things in the English version of SxF seem inconsistent between the anime and manga.

<- Return to Part 4

#spy x family #sxf #spy family #spyxfamily #loid forger #yor forger #anya forger #bond forger #becky blackbell #yuri briar #sxf manga #sxf manga spoilers #sxf anime #sxf spoilers #sxf analysis #sxf meta

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sy-on-boy · 2 years

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Puzzling over the SxF timeline again

Recently, Tare theorised that current SxF has been going on for approx 3 months. Which makes sense to me, but what if we dig deeper?

Ch 27 was the release of midterm exam results, yet Ch 57 marks the end of midterm break (Anya returns to school after cruise arc). How long is this “midterm” thing, actually? And if we treat the dates as consistent, more than a month has passed between these two chapters.

Ch 28 is George’s debut and starts off with George learning his father’s company will be sold to the Desmonds, with the agreement “going into effect on the tenth of next month”. This is on a day “last month”, with the “present time” being right after the release of results. George hired a spy (Daylight) to sabotage Damian’s results (as seen in Ch 27), but failed.

In Ch 28, George admits the plot to everyone. In response to “your family’s company is bankrupt?”, George says “That’s right. As of today.” This means this chapter happens on the 10th of an indeterminable month.

Fast forward to Ch 41, the chapter with Yuri arresting a guy writing false articles about Ostania. Yuri, on his SSS mission, starts to follow Franklin Perkin on the 6th. On the 15th, Yuri and co come to arrest Perkin. Ch 41 presumably takes place from the 6th to the 15th of an indeterminable month.

Now, there’s a whole bunch of stuff between Ch 28 and Ch 41:

Ch 29: Anya visits Loid’s workplace

Ch 30-34: Fiona arc

Ch 35: Yor and Loid’s date, Yor gets drunk

Ch 36: An Imperial Scholars’ mixer is announced + Becky and Anya go shopping

Ch 37-38: The Imperial Scholars’ mixer

Ch 39: Damian trio goes on field trip (presumably on Saturday because there’s no school, making the mixer on a Friday)

Ch 40: Bond helps Loid with work

This sounds about right for the length of a month. At least two separate Fridays are mentioned / inferred, the first one being Henderson’s deadline for the interviewing parents’ workplace project, the second being the (assumed) Imperial Scholars’ mixer. Maybe we can also assume Ch 28 George arc takes place on Oct 10, while Ch 41 Yuri’s investigation takes place from Nov 6th to 15th? This would squish a lot of the earlier Eden chapters though.

After that:

Ch 42: Pastry of knowledge / Old Maid

Ch 43: Yor helps Franky catch a cat (on a work day)

Ch 44: Yor receives details of the cruise ship mission, Anya wins the raffle tickets, it’s mentioned the Princess Lorelei departs on Friday

Ch 45-56: Cruise arc

Ch 57: Midterm break ends

I would estimate maybe 2 weeks between Ch 42 and Ch 57? Or even less if Yor is given extremely short notice about the cruise mission. So is there like almost two months between midterm exams and midterm break?? Or am I misunderstanding these terms lol.

By the way, I checked out the JP raws in case they have their own definition:

Midterm exams: 中間考 (hiragana spells out ちゆうかんとう) (seen in Ch 26)

Midterm break: 中休 (katakana spells out ハーフターム　“half term”) (seen in Ch 57)

Actually, we can also assume Ch 28 takes place on Nov 10, while Ch 41 takes place from Dec 6th to 15th? Since if we count two weeks-ish from mid Dec, it’ll be the end of Dec, making it a perfect time for a break aka cruise arc. But won’t that be the end of a term? I’m confused by myself lol. It also doesn’t seem that cold, judging from their clothes?

This also allows us to count back from George arc.

Ch 26-27: Midterms

Ch 25: Arts and crafts

Ch 24: Yor learns cooking from Camilla

Ch 23: Anya mentions Bond to Damian, names Bond

Ch 18-22: Bond arc

Ch 17: Anya flaunts her Stellar at school and wants to get a dog

Ch 16: Anya saves Ken and gets a Stellar

Ch 15: Dodgeball

Ch 14: Loid suspects Yor of knowing about Yuri being a member of the SSS

Ch 11-13: Yuri debut

Ch 9-10: Anya’s apology + aftermath

Ch 8: Orientation day

In Ch 26, Henderson mentions midterm exams are scheduled “for the week after next”, so Ch 26 takes place around two weeks before Ch 27. So Ch 26 is at the end of a month, since Ch 28 is on the 10th.

… Actually, is it possible for Ch 8-25 to happen in a month? Anya could get her Stellar in her first two(?) weeks at school, squish everything together, Henderson tells them about midterms at the end of Sep, making post-midterms and George on Oct 10th? Even though there’s a gap between actually taking midterms and George. Like, there’s 5 days between results release and Loid infiltrating the school.

By the way, there is apparently a holiday before midterm exams:

In Ch 25, Jeeves asks if Damian will be returning home “for the holiday”, Damian won’t (he’ll be studying for midterms), Demetrius will. What does holiday mean? Boarders stay on campus even on weekends (see Ch 39), so this must be a longer holiday, or a special day.

I feel like I’m confusing myself more, sorry that this post is a bit disorganised haha.

TLDR: Midterm exams either take place in early Oct or Nov, depending on how much you squish / stretch the timeline. Ch 28 takes place on the 10th, Ch 41 from 6th to 15th. Cruise arc and midterm break presumably take place at the end of the month Ch 41 is in.

Or Endo is just making up dates and has no continuity lol.

#spy x family #what am i doing #sxf analysis #meta #ig #ramblings #long post

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